As I face various impediments to my desire to stay involved the field and improve my own skills and knowledge, I am again recognizing the benefit of actually working in a library and the professional support that entails. I was always encouraged in my library jobs to take web tutorials, attend webinars, and read articles pertaining to library science. While I’m still encouraged to “read on the job” , this now covers the topics of art and art history (can’t really complain). I hardly ever have time to catch up on my backlog of library publications (which do not make for enticing reading on the bus after a long day of work).

Ditto the online learning opportunities. It’s not something I can pursue at work, and one of my budgeting sacrifices was to give up broadband at my house. Thus my freetime computing comes via wi-fi at coffeeshops. This gives me exactly 2 possible days a week for online professional development, and all too often webinars are live events that I can’t attend. But I should still try to pursue new alternatives, so I’ve been looking back over some of the best and most flexible options out there for professional development on my own time.

For one thing, just because I can’t attend every conference doesn’t mean I can’t get involved with the conference. More and more often the session notes and even full presentations are available for viewing on the conference websites. Some of my most useful resources are conference session handouts, even after the fact.

I went back and revisited the helpful links to “Free Library-related eLearning sites” on the Library 2.0 site. Here are some that I haven’t really pursued yet:

The Bibliographic Center for Research has “Free Friday Forums” on issues such as the Library of Congress collections, OCLC, FRBR, and RDA. These are archived, so I should be able to check them out.

I’m intrigued by the LISRadio site created by the School of Information Science at the University of Missouri, Columbia, which advertises “interactive webcasts”. There is also an archive. I’m particularly interested in the “On the job” series.

I also looked into taking some classes via the Dona Ana Community College’s Library Science Program (certification, not Master’s degree), such as Advanced Cataloging. They are available online, and at $60 a credit hour are an affordable possibility. I think my skills are current enough right now, but the field is always shifting imperceptibly.

Those are the possibilities, now it’s really just a matter of budgeting the time.